A Fresh And Fruity Look At Spring 2024 (part 4)

The Met Office are trying to convince us that it was well warm this spring despite folk resorting to hot water bottles and bobble hats, so I took a look at HadCET nighttime temperatures 1878-2024

In part 3 of this series I ranted on about the mean being meaningless when it comes to understanding the real world and junked this measure in favour of looking at temperature extremes. I started out looking at the warmer daytime temperature series for both May alone and spring (MAM) for the period 1878 – 2024 in terms of the maximum daytime temperature and the mean daytime temperature. As a result we started booing because May 2024 and spring 2024 didn’t cut the mustard by a long chalk. At no point were these periods in danger of breaking records in terms of hot parts of the day getting hotter. I don’t know about you but I was told that anthropogenic global warming was all about our days getting hotter with all this extra naughty CO2 floating about.

I’m pretty sure that CO2 doesn’t rest during the day or go sip cool beers under a tree, it being a prisoner of its own molecular configuration that is doomed to resonate between two states until it dissociates. Hence the hot parts of the day should be getting hotter over time. Despite this obvious factoid some bods will argue that we can ignore the daytime temperatures and, instead, focus on nighttime temperatures as evidence of anthropogenic warming.

In case one of these bods tries to convince you that night is where the anthro-action is at let me just point out that the Met Office will rush to announce the hottest day ever whenever they can. Hottest days are what experts and alarmists alike will deal in order to sell their ‘science’. However they will shrink to muttering something about nighttime temperatures whenever somebody points out daytime temperature maxima are not increasing over time. This is not just bizarre but downright manipulative, and I’m sure astute readers can think of a dozen reasons why nighttime temperatures might be increasing without resorting to the fossil fuel narrative. With that said I’ll now go bake some nighttime slides for May/spring 2024 so you can see for yourselves the games that are being played.

May Nighttime Temperatures

Herewith the mean nighttime and absolute minimum nighttime series for central England respectively for the month of May occurring between 1878 and 2024:

Mean Nighttime

Will ya jus’ look at that wayward point for May 2024!!! Crikey. That’s the sort of point that would get me scurrying to check for data processing errors or rogue readings. Not so with the Met Office who are happy to accept automated observatory readings contaminated by jet wash, tarmac, concrete, brick, corrugated iron, greenhouse ventilation and ice cream vans.

If we assume all is well with the data and press on, then a linear regression yields a warming trend estimated at 0.72°C per century (p<0.001), which indicates that May nights are getting fractionally warmer over time. I think we can guess which year won the gold with a mean nighttime temperature of 9.88°C - scorchio! Silver went to 1889 with 8.93°C and bronze went to 2008 with 8.90°C.

What nobody will be talking about is the other end of the thermometer for which gold went to 1885 with 4.66°C, silver went to 1996 with 4.72°C and bronze went to 1879 with 4.87°C. We might ask what 1996 is doing coming in second with all that additional CO2 floating around!

Minimum Nighttime

Here we go again with those cosy May nights! I’m sure this is good for those early crops but I guess we’re not allowed to think about that. According to my eyeballs something bizarre seems to be going on with the last few years, as if climate change suddenly decided to get a better grip after 2021. Was this old-fashioned weather getting a better grip on the nation or the authorities tightening their grip on the data?

As for that mildly positive slope linear regression yields a warming trend estimated at 0.91°C per century (p=0.004), which indicates that May extreme nighttime minima are lessening in their frosty frolics over time.

In terms of ‘warm’ medals for nighttime gold went to May 2024 with an absolute minimum of 6.30°C, silver went to 2022 with 5.90°C and bronze went to 1999 with 5.80°C. In terms of ‘cold’ nighttime medals gold went to May 1941 with an absolute minimum of -1.6°C, silver went to 1967 with -1.5°C and bronze went to 1879 with -1.3°C. My mother can vouch for the first two but I’m in danger of getting a dishcloth hurled at me if I dare enquire about 1879!

Spring Nighttime Temperatures

Herewith the mean nighttime and absolute minimum nighttime series for central England respectively for springs occurring between 1878 and 2024:

Mean Nighttime

Linear regression yielded a warming trend of 0.90°C per century (p<0.001), confirming the gradual warming of English spring nights. Spring 2024 is doing its impression of an outlier as before and won the warm nighttime medals gold with 6.85°C. Silver went to 2017 with 6.05°C and bronze went to 2014 with 5.99°C. In terms of cold nighttime medals gold went to 1887 with 2.30°C, silver went to 1883 with 2.43°C and bronze went to 1892 with 2.57°C – a good time to run a hot chestnut barrow, methinks.

Minimum Nighttime

Linear regression yielded a warming trend of 0.98°C per century (p=0.010), confirming the gradual lessening of extreme cold snaps during English spring nights. In terms of warm nighttime medals gold went to 1959 with 0.40°C, silver went to 1994 with 0.30°C and bronze went to 1957 with -0.20°C. In terms of cold medals gold went to 1947 with -9.40°C (ouch!), silver went to 1965 with -9.30°C (flippin ‘eck!) and bronze went to 1909 with -9.00°C (not nice!).

Those who throw soup, hold up traffic and glue themselves to things would like you all to enjoy temperatures such as this without recourse to cheap energy for warm is bad, apparently. But it’s not just the activists who’d prefer a cold planet, for I gather that experts now want to freeze the Arctic as well as capture carbon during a CO2 deficit.

The greens among us are also keen on felling millions of trees to make way for their wind farms that kill wildlife and marine life in large quantities. The same greens want vast solar farms that also damage in various ways; and, whilst billions are poured into these monstrosities, other untold billions are going to be poured by another group of greens into blocking the very sunlight upon which those solar farms depend under the guise of solar radiation management (SRM). And we are an advanced civilisation, are we?

Kettle On!